In his Washington Post column today, George Will recites the facts about Chicago public schools:
Minority pupils compose 89 percent of Chicago’s public-school student body. In third through eighth grades, the percentage of Black students proficient in reading and math are 11 percent and 6 percent. Hispanics: 17 percent, 11 percent. The percentage of 11th-graders proficient on the SAT in reading and math: Black students 10 and 8; Hispanics: 16 and 17. In 22 schools, not a single student can read at grade level; in 33, not a single student can do math at grade level. Even the supposedly good news is disgusting: Last year, the graduation rate was a record high 82.9 percent — even though chronic absenteeism is 49 percent among low-income students.
These are the results of public-school operational spending increasing 58 percent in a decade, to $26,356 per pupil. Mostly this funds teachers’ salaries and benefits. Teachers praising “socialism” and prating about “social justice” thrive while their students’ futures are stunted.
The schools are so bad that Stacy Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, pulled her son from them and enrolled him in a private school. The CTU got its former lobbyist, Brandon Johnson, elected mayor, in part by funding his campaign with an $8 monthly deduction from teachers’ paychecks.
Will writes that Chicago is “a warning to the nation about governments on short leashes tightly held by their employees’ unions.” It is far from the only local government in such a spot. Thirteen of Baltimore’s public high schools have zero students who are proficient in math. Only 11.4 percent of the students in the five best-performing Baltimore public high schools were proficient.
The perpetual failure of 100 percent progressive-run public-school systems to deliver even the most basic results — proficiency shouldn’t be an overly aspirational goal — speaks to the unmanageability of government when countless decisions are controlled by public-sector-union contracts. It wouldn’t make a difference if Abraham Lincoln came back from the dead and became mayor of Chicago. He couldn’t erase the union contracts that would prevent him from reforming much of what ails Chicago schools.
That’s why Philip Howard argues that public-sector unions are unconstitutional. They exercise fundamentally governmental responsibilities without any of the accountability built into the Constitution to protect citizens from abuse. They remove power from voters to make changes in their government. And they cause the awful results we see in Chicago, where thousands of students are stuck in dreadful schools while they enrich themselves at taxpayers’ expense.